"When it comes to playing with Mother Nature, any mistakes could have dire consequences." So it raises the question: What might happen to our nation’s food supply when corporations control it?" "Genetically-modified crops are a billion-dollar-a-year industry, and as we’ve seen with the current banking crisis, a lack of regulation opens the way for greed to overwhelm common sense. "Of the 40 genetically-modified crops approved last year, only eight have published safety studies," he said in a recent interview with the Philadelphia Examiner.
Doomsday vault essay full#
The book is full of his trademark conspiracies and scary creatures such as "roaming bands of polar bears" guarding his Doomsday Vault in Norway ("this little detail, by the way, is true"), but his interviews focus more on the "dangers of rampant technology and unregulated science." It's a topic author James Rollins is trying to draw serious attention to during publicity tours for his fiction novel "The Doomsday Key," which has been high on bestseller lists since being released earlier this year. James Rollins, author of "The Doomsday Key," high on bestseller lists since its release earlier this year, is using his book to warn about the "dangers of rampant technology and unregulated science."Īlso mentioned frequently are genetically modified crops as bioengineering seeks to create seeds adaptable to various conditions. Among the issues are whether seed banks give governments and/or agribusiness excessive control of the world's potential future food supply, and if vaults create a lax attitude about preparing farmers at the local level to deal with disasters and climate change. "If you have something as big and as important as the seed vault you will necessarily attract some weird reactions," said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a foundation focusing on long-term food security in the face of escalating problems such as climate change and rapid population growth.Īnother nickname for the Svalbard facility burrowed more than 100 meters into a mountainside is the "new Noah's Ark," a concept used by two independent filmmakers whose short movies fictionalize concerns about the vault. The remote "exotic" location captured and continues to receive widespread global media interest, as does its exclusive status as the "backup" for other gene bank facilities with its record capacity of 2.25 billion seeds. The seed vault, despite opening only 17 month ago, is perhaps the best-known of 1,400 such facilities worldwide for storing spare seeds deposited by countries and institutions for emergency use.
Then there's the "terminator" and "zombie" seeds associated with the facility's purpose. The scientists actually involved with the facility, he added, "were very careful not to call it a doomsday vault." "When opening it a year ago there was a bit of a joke in the science press: 'Ha, ha - they are opening a doomsday vault,'" said Roland von Bothmer, a professor at the Nordic Genetic Resource Center who manages public relations for the seed vault. Maybe it's due to one of the vault's nicknames. Much of it centers around a place bearing remarkable resemblance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault - when it's not named directly - and some isn't entirely in jest. Just ask a child heroine drawn "into a savage struggle among armoured bears and witch clans of the Arctic, and lead her to a scientific research centre where experiments too horrible to talk about are being carried out." Or villains motivated by the theory "control food and you control all the people of the world.”Įnd-of-the-world and out-of-this-world tales are being spun into a wide variety of pop culture, including the heroine starring in a children's play based on a major motion picture and the food villains in a current bestselling novel. It seems the Forces Of Evil, when not forging Obama's birth documents and creating more film of the false moon landing, are busy these days plotting the apocalypse in secretive research facilities in the Norwegian Arctic. But portraits of a far more sophisticated and devious place are being painted by writers, filmmakers and other architects of pop culture. The facility inside a mountain consists primarily of a 130-meter tunnel leading to three spartan storage rooms lined with metal shelves. Local | Diversions | Polar Regions | World | Opinion | Blog | Photos | Video | Audio | Games | Resourcesįrom novels to video games, science gets sinister in SvalbardĬary Fowler, right, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, talks with a television crew during a tour of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Theworld's northernmost alternative newspaper
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